Chapter 20

It hadn’t taken long for their clothes to dry in the night, though Charlotte regretted her prudery. Her wet underwear had chilled her to the bone and she’d slept fitfully on the loamy earth. As the fire died down, her teeth chattered and her body shook, and she crept right up to the dying coals. Then Eugene would put more wood on the fire and she’d have to roll away from it to avoid scalding her hands and her face – but even then, her back was icy, and she had to turn herself often like a rotisserie chicken. By morning she was sleeping on the warm ash – her entire right side dusted white. Her neck ached and her fingers felt as though they had seized and would never bend again.

Charlotte sat up at the sound of Eugene’s movements. He was standing at the branch where Charlotte had hung her clothes.

“If it’s okay with you, I think I’ll take my gun back.”

“Morning,” replied Charlotte.

In the light of day, Charlotte and Eugene surveyed their surroundings. The choice of place to camp hadn’t been bad – they hadn’t been spotted, after all. But instead of being way down the hill and out of view, they were camping only about a hundred metres beyond a grassed farmhouse garden, complete with farmhouse. A porch overlooked the garden, the farm and beyond that the river, and anyone stepping out onto it with their cup of morning coffee in hand would have seen two sleeping bodies huddled around the ashes of a fire beside the bush-lined river.

“We’d better find some cover,” said Eugene. “Whoever lives there won’t be thrilled to see us camping here.” His tone was urgent and he gestured for Charlotte to get up.

“Is there a plan?”

“I’ve been considering a couple of ideas. None are ideal. But first we’ve got to get out of sight, so you need to get up.”

“I have a plan – and it’s about as ideal as I can imagine.”

“Really?” said Eugene in surprise.

“There’s no one in that farmhouse,” said Charlotte.

“How can you tell?”

“I used to live on a farm; a farmhouse is never that quiet. Plus these fields are in rotation – they’ll only plant in about three months.”

“Okay ...”

“So we go up there, knock on the door, just to be sure, with some story about being lost, then we let ourselves in if no one answers – have some breakfast, a bath maybe, and we call the police.”

“In that order?” said Eugene, thinking over Charlotte’s suggestion and glancing about the lifeless farmland. But there was no decision to be made, they were both cold and hungry, and if there was a phone in there, they could make a call. Maybe to the cops, Eugene hadn’t decided yet.

Charlotte started up the field even before she’d heard Eugene’s response. The earth was soft under her feet and the ploughed ridges gave way as she walked. The garden was fenced off from the farmland around it – it had a little chicken-wire fence and a juvenile hedge marking the boundary. Charlotte undid the latch for the gate and swung it open. It creaked quietly. Eugene followed her in. A path led up to the porch, on the right of which was a bay window, crowned with a modernised Cape Dutch gable. The curtains were closed. Charlotte noticed a gap and lifted herself up with one foot on the rim wall that encircled the foundation and leant in close to the glass. The room was dark. There was a double bed against the opposite wall, stripped down, no sheets, no covers, no pillows. It was sign enough.

“There’s no one here,” said Charlotte in a whisper.

The crest of the sun was beginning to appear over the opposite river bank, which ran steeply down to the water.

They both tiptoed around the house, still wary of any inhabitants, looking for an entry point. The back door was bolted shut and padlocked from the outside and the side window was locked, but the kitchen window, though latched closed, was loose.

Eugene found a rusted pick head in the garden and wedged it under the window to lever it open. There was a crack as the latch gave way. Charlotte looked across the open farmland to be sure that no one had heard it. Eugene lifted himself up first and slid through onto the kitchen sink. Charlotte followed. She was aching all over from the cold now, but the promise of a bath eased the pain.

Though dark, they could begin to make out the lay of the room. It was tastefully modern with lots of thick natural wood. The floor was screeded and a huge double-door fridge took up almost one whole wall. Eugene opened it. It was off, and it was empty, with just the faint smell of onions lingering inside it.

Behind the kitchen door was the switchboard, and Charlotte set about flipping all the switches up. First the geyser, then the lights, then the plugs.

“It’ll take a while for the geyser to heat up. You try the phone, I’ll get breakfast,” she said.

Eugene left to explore the house and to find the phone. It was at the end of the hallway near the front door on a low table. He sat down on the accompanying stool and stared at the handset. Calling the police was the obvious thing to do – but he already knew it was a bad idea. If it were as simple as that, he might not have suggested camping the night. He’d have hiked on to the outskirts of town and found a payphone. The problem was that he couldn’t be sure he could trust the police. He had often wondered how strange it was that the police had never once investigated Vastrap, a major project like that. It was certainly suspicious enough – even a mad woman from Kimberley had thought so. Either the police were aware of Vastrap, or they weren’t smart enough to notice the scores of scientists driving into the desert every day. If they knew about it, then calling them would simply result in the black Hummers arriving at the farm and turning the farmhouse into Swiss cheese. And if they weren’t aware of Vastrap, they’d most likely be no help at all. Finding a phone was part of his plan, but now that he was sitting beside one, he realised that he’d never intended calling the police – and if he wasn’t going to call the police, then who? He’d hoped he would know by the time he reached for the handset. But he didn’t. Even as he stretched his hand out and brought his fingers to rest on the receiver, he hoped for a spark of inspiration. He rested his hand there for a minute and then stood up from the stool.

When he returned to the kitchen, Charlotte had laid out a spread of tinned foods from the pantry. There were mussels and oysters and asparagus and tinned viennas and baked beans in tomato sauce and half pears in syrup. She’d dished up a bit of everything onto two plates, and was scratching through the kitchen drawers for some cutlery. There were two mugs of steaming coffee on the table too – sweetened and whitened with generous dollops of condensed milk.

“What did they say?” asked Charlotte eagerly.

“I didn’t call them, and before you go crazy, just listen.”

Charlotte returned to the table with two tablespoons.

As they sat and ate, Eugene explained his reasoning to Charlotte, and she nodded slowly in agreement, sipping on her coffee and stuffing her mouth with viennas and mussels. It was right to be wary. They’d get no second chances if the Vastrap crew caught them.

“How about we call in an anonymous tip, saying that there was a mass murder at Vastrap?” suggested Charlotte.

“I was thinking about that. It’d do our situation no good, though. If they trace our call, we’ll have them right on our tails again.”

“But if we call in the slaughter at Vastrap, and the cops aren’t in on it, it’ll make the headlines, surely. It’ll be on the news. The whole thing will be exposed and then we can come forward.”

“And if it doesn’t make the news …?”

“Then those mad Voortrekkers and the police are in cahoots and we’re in the kak,” said Charlotte.

“Yes, deeply in it. Okay, let’s do that. We’ll have to be ready to get moving as soon as we make the call – so if you want to call any family or take a bath, you’d better do that now.”

It was 6:05. Lindy would be at home, asleep. Charlotte could call and let her know that she was in trouble, and that she had a plan, that she’d hopefully be back in Kimberley in the next couple of days. Lindy’s reaction would be pure panic, and Charlotte would have to talk her out of going to the police. It would be absolute torture for Lindy to know that her sister was in trouble and that the best thing she could do was carry on with life. She’d have a stomach ulcer within the hour.

Charlotte took a huge scoop of condensed milk, and, twirling it in the air so that it didn’t drip on the table, she lifted it to her mouth and cleaned the spoon with her tongue. Then she left Eugene to get stuck into the meal – which he did. He dipped one of the few remaining mussels into the condensed milk and tried it. It wasn’t bad. Salty and sweet, fishy and milky.

Charlotte found the phone at the end of the hall and picked up the handset.

“There’s no dial tone,” she called out.

Eugene came striding down the passage, holding his spoon and chewing a mouthful of asparagus.

“Are you sure?” he asked. He took the phone from Charlotte and dialled out a random Morse code, trying to reset the line. Nothing.

“They must have turned off the bloody line when they left.”

Charlotte’s face was filled with disappointment.

“But I bet the hot water’s on by now,” added Eugene.

Charlotte didn’t hesitate. She rushed off to explore the bathrooms. The best was the en-suite off the main bedroom. It had a huge tub on pewter feet, with all sorts of bath salts and bubble soaps huddled around the taps. Charlotte twisted the hot tap and held her hand under the running water. It was almost hot enough. She’d just not add any cold and it’d be okay. She stripped down out of her ash and dirt-covered clothes and then sorted through the range of bath additives. She wanted bubbles, and loads of them.

How silly that we slept just down the hill from this luxury the whole terrible night, she thought. In the night she’d scarcely thought about what they would do come sunrise. Her only priority was food and warmth. Now, the warm water of the bath was beyond luxury.

As she sat in the bath and felt the water thaw her toes and her feet and her legs and her body and lastly her brain, she finally gave proper attention to her situation.

She’d witnessed a mass murder. She was on the run from men who wanted her dead. She’d learned that a secret faction of the long-dead apartheid government was planning on colonising space. She’d spent the night camping next to a fire with a strange man – who for most of the time was naked. And now she had broken into someone’s house and was using their bathtub – having devoured the contents of their kitchen.

“Eugene!” Charlotte called from the bath. She heard Eugene stand up from the kitchen table and walk to the doorway of the bedroom.

“Yes?” he said.

“Can you see if they have any good wine?”